Wow, no posts this year. Well, not to worry, there will be plenty soon, as I’ve had a bigger project going on since summer.
Anyhow, in his book, Next Level Deckbuilding, Patrick Chapin talked about benchmarking creatures. He didn’t actually use the word ‘benchmark’, but that’s what I’m using. Well, that was 2013, so quite a few things have changed since then, so perhaps it’s time to update that.
Yes, if you are not Finnish, that is Poro Invitational. Poromagia is a Finnish game store, so the pun is just kind of obvious. Poro Tour itself consists of four tournaments. This year it was Standard, Sealed and Modern twice. There’s also a bunch of other tournaments, which grant you a few points.
I made it into the finals of the Standard and did fairly well in the Sealed. The Moderns… weell, not good. Don’t tell my team that I might not have taken those tournaments very seriously. Modern just isn’t my format. Based on this I wasn’t really expecting to be invited into the Invitational, but after some people above me in the rankings had to drop out, I made it in from the reserve spots.
This seems to have largely flown under the radar, but yesterday WotC gave us a list of cards which are going to be added to Magic Arena a week from now for the Historic format. The cards are:
A colleague told me that his kid was getting into Magic. Since I have a largish collection of draft chaff, I thought I might make the kid and his friend a couple of decks.
Well, we are teachers, so obviously I started to think about this from the point of view of teaching. However, here’s another problem: I can’t really control the process.
I wrote about the same subject earlier this year, but my thoughts have since matured somewhat.
There seems to a lot of interest in the format, as many cards have seen prices surges and there’s a lot of discussion. So, I’m just throwing a few more ideas out there.
Some more ideas on how to approach Pioneer differently.
Ah, a new format. Well, sort of. It’s quite obvious that the first decks out there will be strong decks from Standards past or light versions of Modern decks. Like Rally or Saheeli Cat. I’m not going that route.
Morphs are a favored archetype of mine. I just love them. The imbalance of information is fun for me. Sure, that also has a downside as that often means that you are the target.
Anyhow, before Kadena, it was hard to find a good commander for the deck. Sure, we had Ixidor, Reality Sculptor, but that definitely had limitations as a monocolored general. I was hoping for a Simic one, but they gave me a Sultai. As much as I like Sultai, I do wish they would limit the colors, as blue and green were the big morph colors on Tarkir, even if all colors had them.
So, there’s been some information trickling on this. If you don’t know, the age old Judge Program is in the process of being taken down in lieu of Judge Academy, a business, which can now charge people for being a judge.